Tag Archives: Marxism

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Is Obamacare a spectacular failure because of incompetence, or by design?

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Private insurer participation in Obamacare exchanges, 2015-2016
Private insurer participation in Obamacare exchanges, 2015-2016

First, let’s establish that Obamacare really is a failed policy.

One of my favorite health policy experts Sally C. Pipes reports for CNBC (H/T Bree) on how private insurers are reversing their decision to sell customers Obamacare policies.

Excerpt:

Aetna the nation’s fourth-largest health insurer, just decided to stop offering plans on Obamacare’s exchanges in all but four states in 2017. The firm says that it was losing roughly $300 million per year on these policies. And it projected that its losses would only increase, since the share of covered individuals “in need of high-cost care” was growing, according to CEO Mark Bertolini.

Aetna isn’t the only insurer giving up on Obamacare. UnitedHealth, America’s biggest insurer, will sell plans in just three states next year, down from 34 this year. Humana will offer coverage in just 156 counties in 2017, 88 percent fewer than this year.

In other words, the insurance “death spiral” has arrived. Obamacare’s critics have long predicted that exchange plans’ high premiums and deductibles would keep all but the sickest Americans from enrolling. These people would need so much medical care that insurers would lose money no matter how much they raised premiums. Eventually, insurers would have no choice but to pull out.

[…]Insurers that haven’t pulled out of Obamacare are requesting premium hikes averaging 24 percent next year. And some states have it far worse. Many Georgians could see a hike of 65 percent. The 600,000 Texans enrolled in Blue Cross Blue Shield may face a 59 percent premium increase.

I must have blogged about 50 posts on Obamacare, and why it would fail, before the 2012 election. I even had podcasts and articles by Sally C. Pipes! She predicted all of this long ago. The 2012 election was our last chance to stop it, and we failed.

Obamacare premium growth, 2015-2016
Obamacare premium growth, 2015-2016

I always like to think about the future so I can prepare for it. Investors Business Daily thinks that if Hillary is elected, she will use this crisis to push for single payer health care. Single payer basically means that you pay into the government based on what you earn, and the sickest / least responsible people get a deal because they get “free” care. It’s a terrible deal for healthy, fit single men who never use health care. We have to pay about $10,000 a year in taxes, and never use it.

Investors Business Daily explains:

So what’s Hillary Clinton’s answer to the failing private exchanges? Get more people on government insurance through what she calls the “public option.” This would be a government-run health care plan offered in ObamaCare exchanges across the country.

“The public option, Clinton says, “will strengthen competition and reduce costs.”

But wait a minute. The “public option” was pushed by liberal Democrats in 2009 when ObamaCare was being built, and it was rejected by centrists in the party because it looked too much like a steppingstone to single payer.

As a matter of fact, that was the idea behind the “public option” in the first place.

As Mark Schmitt explained in the liberal American Prospect, “The public option was part of a carefully thought out and deliberately funded effort (to convince the single-payer crowd) they could live with the public option as a kind of stealth single-payer.” The idea was that the public option would be able to undercut private plans, driving them all out of the exchanges.

But all those centrists Democrats who opposed the public option are gone from the Senate, and if Hillary Clinton gets elected with a more liberal Senate majority, the public option will likely be top of her agenda.

With the vast Medicaid expansion, and the public option (as well as Clinton’s proposal to expand Medicare), it’s not far-fetched to say that soon the only people covered by private insurance will be the diminishing number who get it through work. (ObamaCare was also designed to shrink employer-based health.)

I guess my solution to this is to hang on to my employer-subsidized plan for as long as I can, and then if single-payer becomes the law, then I’ll just ease back my working. Maybe work part-time in a less demanding job. I don’t want to get up and go to work to pay for strangers, especially if their “health care” is just abortions, in vitro fertilization, drug addiction therapy, breast enlargements and sex changes – which is what happens in countries where the government does run health care. They just use it as a way to buy votes.

News

FBI: if other people do what Hillary did then they will be prosecuted, but she won’t be

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help

A round-up of reactions from around the Internet, on the right and on the left.

First, here’s radical leftist Chris Cilliza, writing in the radically leftist Washington Post, of all places:

FBI Director James B. Comey dismantled large portions of Clinton’s long-told story about her private server and what she sent or received on it during a stirring 15-minute news conference, after which he took no questions. While Comey exonerated Clinton, legally speaking, he provided huge amounts of fodder that could badly hamstring her in the court of public opinion.

Most importantly, Comey said the FBI found 110 emails on Clinton’s server that were classified at the time they were sent or received. That stands in direct contradiction to Clinton’s repeated insistence she never sent or received any classified emails. And it even stands in contrast to her amended statement that she never knowingly sent or received any classified information.

[…]Comey said Clinton had used not one but multiple private email servers during her time at State. He said Clinton used multiple email devices during that time. (She had offered her desire to use a single device for “convenience” as the main reason she set up the private server.)

[…]It’s hard to read Comey’s statement as anything other than a wholesale rebuke of the story Clinton and her campaign team have been telling ever since the existence of her private email server came to light in spring 2015. She did send and receive classified emails. The setup did leave her — and the classified information on the server — subject to a possible foreign hack. She and her team did delete emails as personal that contained professional information.

Those are facts, facts delivered by the Justice Department of a Democratic administration. And those facts run absolutely counter to the narrative put forth by the Clinton operation: that this whole thing was a Republican witch-hunt pushed by a bored and adversarial media.

Andrew McCarthy in National Review:

There is no way of getting around this: According to Director JamesComey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services.

Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States.

In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.

David French in National Review:

[…]Comey noted that her personal e-mail server was less secure than Google’s Gmail:

None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government — or even with a commercial service like Gmail.

[…]I defy any member of the military or any civilian not directly affiliated with Hillary Clinton to engage in such conduct and get away with it. The first thing that would happen is you would lose your security clearance. Next, you would lose your job. Finally, good luck escaping prosecution. Comey claims that prior FBI prosecutions included “some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice.”

I blogged previously about how Clinton’s private unsecure e-mail server was was definitely compromised by foreign governments and hackers. She was the top diplomat of the United States of America. Clandestine agents and their sources would undoubtedly have been compromised.

The FBI has been focusing its attention on Christians and conservatives for quite some time, and letting the real criminals on the secular left go Scot free. So their refusal to enforce the law here is no surprise. It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last time.

At the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro notes that the timing of this non-prosecution is suspect:

Just days after the Attorney General of the United States Loretta Lynch held a secret meeting aboard a plane with former President Bill Clinton – whose wife was under FBI investigation; just the day after Hillary leaked that she’d want Lynch for her own administration; just hours after the President of the United States Barack Obama flew Hillary – still under FBI investigation – down to North Carolina on Air Force One; just two hours before Obama was to open his campaign on behalf of Hillary Clinton, FBI Director James Comey announced that while Hillary Clinton had clearly engaged in criminal activity worthy of prosecution, he had recommended that she not be prosecuted.

James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal:

After announcing his no-charge recommendation, Comey added:

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.

In other words, laws are for little people.

So let’s take stock. Nobody was prosecuted for the Clinton Foundation donations from foreign sources. Nobody was prosecuted for Fast and Furious gunrunning to Mexican drug cartels. Nobody was prosecuted for Benghazi. Nobody was prosecuted for the IRS persecution of Christians and conservatives. And nobody was prosecuted for the Clinton unsecure e-mail server.

News

If socialism is so great, why are people moving from blue California to red Texas?

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Migration from California to other states
Migration from California to other states – top 3 states are conservative states

A lot of young people seem to be really excited about socialism, and they want the United States to give it a try. They don’t know where socialism has been tried, and they don’t know what happens with it is tried. It just sounds nice to them.

Well, if you were going to pick one of the most socialist states in the United States, no one would fault you for picking California, where Democrats are running everything, and have been for a long time.

The Washington Free Beacon explains what happened next:

The number of Californians leaving the state and moving to Texas is at its highest level in nearly a decade, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service.

According to IRS migration data, which uses individual income tax returns to record year-to-year address changes, over 250,000 California residents moved out of the state between 2013 and 2014, the latest period for which data was available. The tax returns reported more than $21 billion in adjusted gross income to the IRS.

Of the returns, 33,626 reported address changes from California to Texas, which has been the top destination for individuals leaving California since 2007. Californians who moved to Texas between 2013 and 2014 reported $2.19 billion in adjusted gross income.

[…]“California’s taxes and regulations are crushing businesses, and there are more opportunities in Texas for people to start new companies, get good jobs, and create better lives for their families,” said Nathan Nascimento, the director of state initiatives at Freedom Partners. “When tax and regulatory climates are bad, people will move to better economic environments—this phenomenon isn’t a mystery, it’s how marketplaces work. Not only should other state governments take note of this, but so should the federal government.”

According to Tom Gray of the Manhattan Institute, people may be leaving California for the employment opportunities, tax breaks, or less crowded living arrangements that other states offer.

“States with low unemployment rates, such as Texas, are drawing people from California, whose rate is above the national average,” Gray wrote. “Taxation also appears to be a factor, especially as it contributes to the business climate and, in turn, jobs.”

“Most of the destination states favored by Californians have lower taxes,” Gray wrote. “States that have gained the most at California’s expense are rated as having better business climates. The data suggest that may cost drivers—taxes, regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power, and high labor costs—are prompting businesses to locate outside California, thus helping to drive the exodus.”

Just recently, I heard some of my Democrat co-workers laughing to each other about “trickle-down economics”, which is the “ridiculous” idea that if you allow businesses and workers to keep what they earn, then you’ll get more economic growth than if the government takes the money to study the drug use patterns of sex workers in the far East. Actually, we’ve been trying socialism-lite in this country for the past 7 years. How has it worked? Well, Obama has averaged 1.2% GDP growth through his presidency, far below average. And in order to get even that little growth, Obama will double the debt from 10 to 20 trillion in just 8 years.

Debt increase under Barack Obama
Debt increase under Barack Obama

But what about tax cuts? Do tax cuts create economic growth?

The conservative Heritage Foundation think tank describes the effects of the Bush tax cuts.

Excerpt:

President Bush signed the first wave of tax cuts in 2001, cutting rates and providing tax relief for families by, for example, doubling of the child tax credit to $1,000.

At Congress’ insistence, the tax relief was initially phased in over many years, so the economy continued to lose jobs. In 2003, realizing its error, Congress made the earlier tax relief effective immediately. Congress also lowered tax rates on capital gains and dividends to encourage business investment, which had been lagging.

It was the then that the economy turned around. Within months of enactment, job growth shot up, eventually creating 8.1 million jobs through 2007. Tax revenues also increased after the Bush tax cuts, due to economic growth.

[…]The CBO incorrectly calculated that the post-March 2003 tax cuts would lower 2006 revenues by $75 billion. Revenues for 2006 came in $47 billion above the pre-tax cut baseline.

Here’s what else happened after the 2003 tax cuts lowered the rates on income, capital gains and dividend taxes:

  • GDP grew at an annual rate of just 1.7% in the six quarters before the 2003 tax cuts. In the six quarters following the tax cuts, the growth rate was 4.1%.
  • The S&P 500 dropped 18% in the six quarters before the 2003 tax cuts but increased by 32% over the next six quarters.
  • The economy lost 267,000 jobs in the six quarters before the 2003 tax cuts. In the next six quarters, it added 307,000 jobs, followed by 5 million jobs in the next seven quarters.

The timing of the lower tax rates coincides almost exactly with the stark acceleration in the economy. Nor was this experience unique. The famous Clinton economic boom began when Congress passed legislation cutting spending and cutting the capital gains tax rate.

Regarding the “Clinton economic boom”, that was caused by supply-sider Newt Gingrich passing tax cuts through the House and Senate. Bill Clinton merely signed the bills into law.

Very important to compare times and places where socialism has been tried to times and places where free enterprise and limited government have been tried. We know what works. It may not be what makes us feel smug, but we know what works.